There’s your average bedroom paperback fiction, then there are masterpieces of fiction.
I offer my heartfelt congratulations to the Bureau of Labor Statistics for this masterpiece of bovine scatology they presented with a straight face this morning at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
This is the quote direct from the webpage of the BLS this morning:
Based on what yours truly highlighted above, the BLS used “nonsurvey” data instead of “survey” data to selectively determine the outcome.
Too strong?
How else can one explain the discrepancy between the data collected by the BLS via “nonsurvey” sources versus say, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank with the month over month and annualized sticky-CPI data:
So who is one to believe?
These pages have long maintained that using the Atlanta Fed is a much more consistent and logical analysis of consumer price increases.
But when one starts to lift the hood on the apparently politically motivated results published today, I’m sorry not sorry that one has to call the administration out, just as I did under Biden, Obama, and Bush in the past.
For example this post from Truflation on X summarizes my doubts without making me do the research of what was published this morning (and thank you for that):
A few notes on the latest, rather incomplete and surprising BLS CPI inflation release.
— Truflation (@truflation) December 18, 2025
There seem to be swings and volatility in the gov data, suggesting incomplete data collection. Some data is missing entirely, suggesting this CPI cannot be treated as a complete read of… https://t.co/5JHj9Lz1Yw pic.twitter.com/TeVULKZeLl
So the new BLS collection techniques are supposed to have the American people and economists believe that we are able to collect ‘some’ data from the Tampa BEA but not Miami? From Minneapolis but not San Francisco?
And to make matters even worse:
Basically the BLS took the 42% imputed data from September and said “screw it” we’ll make it up as we go along for every month at an even higher rate of guessing.
For Wall Street it was enough to generate an algo driven low volume rally but the truth is that most of the real money on Wall Street has checked out and barring a war where the United States gets hurt, after tomorrow’s data dump, the children will be in charge of trading and the real money will not be back until after January 6th.
Unfortunately, fauxflation, the manufactured data for manipulating interest rates and not reality is the current mindset of this administration.
I just hope for domestic political stability’s sake that everyone keeps cheering when 3% inflation is published by the current circus clowns when deflation takes hold and asset prices for what the average American holds collapses without warning.
